Good Neighbors Can Make Good Fences

But when it comes to Mexico, the United States isn’t being very neighborly.

- Katherine Mangu-Ward

GOOD FENCES MAKE good neighbors, or so Robert Frost reminds us in his annoyingly overused and frequently misquoted high school literature class staple. The poem that made the adage famous actually offers a more ambiguous take on the utility of border barriers than its signature line would suggest, with the speaker musing: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offence.”

The question of what exactly is being walled in or walled out by Donald Trump’s barrier—he issued commands for the “immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border” in a January 25 executive order—is trickier to answer than it initially appears. The short answer, illegal immigrants, is an unsatisfactory one, in part because so many other goals tend to get lumped in once the policy rationalization process gets rolling, including drug interdiction, terrorism prevention, and tariff enforcement.

The question of who will be offended is easier. From Trump’s unflattering remarks about Mexican immigrants while announcing his candidacy in June 2015 to his ongoing insistence that Mexico will pay for the wall, much offense has been given, and much taken.